So, for two projects I’m doing, I re-watched The Witch (2016, Robert Eggers) and I must say that my response to it was much different than when I first watched it. My first viewing of the film wasn’t entirely negative but I didn’t love the film; I thought it was a bit muddled and didn’t offer up a coherent deeper meaning. Watching it again, now I think the film is not only coherently deep, it also offers up radical deeper implications. I should just add that, for me, these radical deeper implications also make The Witch an extremely bleak and unpleasant film.
A Feminist Reading
This is the reading in the film that is getting the most oxygen and with good reason, since it is the most palpable thread in the film and the cleanest one. The film reveals the deep misogyny within Christianity. And, yes, this film’s focus is on Puritanism, but since Puritanism is an (extreme) branch of (English Protestant) Christianity and since we know much of what we get in the film echoes Christianity in general, the film’s commentary on the built-in sexism and misogyny in Christianity rings true. As so many got at when the film came out and since then, director Robert Eggers makes it clear from the get go that Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is no ordinary passive and obedient Puritan girl. We get this from the opening moment when she hesitates before leaving the space where her father has been judged and banished from the congregation. From there, Eggers gives us her distinct point of view as she leaves the Puritan community, the gates swinging shut suggesting that an avenue has been closed to her, the community perhaps giving her more outlets for her free spirit self had she had that opportunity. And then we get that striking shot of Thomasin looking at the community she is leaving behind while the rest of her family look away, a stress on the fact that they will fall in line with their husband-father-patriarch while Thomasin is already her own person.
We get other such moments, as when Eggers strikingly focuses on her praying, her confession seeming to suggest both normalcy – human beings are forever fallible and will “sin,” e.g., exhibit natural human failings – and, in the context of becoming a good Puritan woman, hints of her growing resistance to such an oppressive way of being. Many have read this moment as the moment when the Devil will mark Thomasin as a target for bringing her to the dark side, and I suppose in the context of what may seem like a focused contest between good and “evil,” that is true, but for me this is just a moment, like moments to follow, where we begin to see Thomasin as ostensibly wanting to be a good Puritan woman but also that part of her (free spirit) self who wants something else out of life. In her prayer, she says, “I here confess I’ve lived in sin. And broken every one of thy commandments in thought. Followed the desires of mine own will and not the Holy Spirit. I know I deserve more shame and misery in this life and everlasting hellfire.” Again, this part of the prayer is striking; ostensibly it is Thomasin wishing she could be a better, more devout, Puritan, but if we think of her sentiments as logging her “return of the repressed” — that which she suppresses but really desires — then we can see how her “thoughts” belie her true desires to self-determine herself. In the way I read the film, we get this sensibility throughout the film, such as when we get that shot that Eggers holds as she looks longingly towards the woods (see below), as if she knows that “freedom” from her bondage may be there, the forest in this film representing a “primal” space or the witch’s space, a space of “freedom,” albeit a “freedom” that is “free” in one sense but not “free” at all. I’ll come back to this at the end.
“Proud Slut”
Also striking is the ending sequence when the mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), has a complete melt down and lashes out at Thomasin, suggesting that Thomasin is a “proud slut,” tempting both her brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) and even her father, William (Ralph Ineson), with her maturing womanhood. What’s crazy about this rant by the mother is that Thomasin doesn’t really register any sexual desire throughout the film. Yes, we get some touchy-feely moments between Thomasin and Caleb and an uncomfortable moment when Thomasin is ordered to attend to the disrobing of her father, but the former seems to me anyway more innocent sibling bonding and the latter is an order by her mother, not something that Thomasin seems to relish. The real sexual desire stems from Caleb, who glances at his sister’s breasts, a symptom of the family disconnecting themselves from the congregation, giving Caleb’s own maturing sexual desire no place to go but his sister, a further hint at how this family’s belief systems is its own worst enemy. More pointedly, that it is Caleb who visibly expresses sexual desire and not Thomasin — and that it is Thomasin who is attacked for it, not Caleb — also speaks to the built in sexism of Christianity.
More generally, that’s why the mother’s accusations are so startling because Thomasin is the epitome of “pure” and innocent before this moment. But then that’s in large part how Eggers gets at the irrational view of women by a Christian belief system, who, beginning with Eve, have been seen as a symbol of “sin” and temptation. Women are seen in this belief system as lacking the ability to control their sexual desires and thus need patriarchal reins to keep these sexual desires under control or negate them altogether. That the “witch” archetype is historically seen as represented solely by women is no accident, since this figure was created as a symbol of women who refuse social order (Christian) constraints, both in terms of refusing patriarchal ownership and in terms of actualizing their sexual desires. They are coded as “evil” — linked to the Devil — as a way to code these free spirit, agentic attributes as abnormal and against God and thus needing to be reined back into the control of their patriarchal (Christian) masters. In this way, we can see where the mother’s irrational diatribe – and both parents’ all too easy ready acceptance of Thomasin as a witch – comes from, not from actual reality but from what she believes from her own Christian indoctrination and thus so readily projects onto Thomasin. And that gets at one of the crucial deeper implications of the film, how it reveals Christian beliefs to be toxic, since in believing in preternatural happenings, they can only see in bad happenings some preternatural explanation, and from that, project fault onto Others, usually women.
(For more on the history of the “witch” and the many representations of this figure, see this excellent essay, “‘Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?’: Female Persecution and Redemption in The Witch.”)
A Prequel to The Crucible
In some ways, the film could also be seen as a kind of prequel to The Crucible (both the seminal Arthur Miller play and the underrated film adaptation of it), spectators getting a micro narrative of a singular “crucible” scenario, with first the twins then the parents believing pure – purely good – Thomasin is a witch, when of course she isn’t. When the father says that he will tell the council on her, he is condemning his own daughter to horrible torture, suffering and death.
But by seeming to make the witch real, and the Devil real, and Thomasin’s slide into becoming a witch real, isn’t the film then suggesting that perhaps at least some women condemned in the Salem witch trials were real witches? When I first watched the film, I thought this was a real flaw in the film, but now I I don’t think so anymore though I would understand while some people would think this. For me, what has changed is that I now understand the value of making the witch real while also still wanting to make this “crucible” scenario manifest as well. I’ll get at the former (“the value of making the witch real”) below, but in terms of the later, I still think Eggers makes a compelling “crucible” scenario despite making the witch real. That is, what is so striking is that since Thomasin is not a witch, the film reconciles this potential flaw by making it clear that in a world of real witches, most if not all the women condemned were not witches and thus still unfairly accused, tortured, and slaughtered.
The other thing that the film does, and to my mind this is one way in which the film is truly radical and bold, is in condemning Puritans/Christians for not just murdering innocent women but in perhaps driving some of them, perhaps many (most?) of them, to witchcraft. That gets to an even more radical point the film seems to be making.
Two Evils
For me, less talked about is how the film’s bleakness stems not just from the truly disturbing fall of this entire family, and we must not forget that an innocent baby is slaughtered and three young children are horribly killed (yes, the twins are thoroughly annoying, but then they are just children who don’t seem to have any boundaries placed on them!) but from another crucial focus in the film. That is, the other bleak and truly despairing element in the film is how the film leaves Thomasin with no place to go. She is in effect caught between two evils, not just the temptation of going to the dark side and sign her soul away to the Devil and become a witch, but she is also facing a life of oppression with her Puritan family and Puritan way of being, a life where she will never be able to self-determine or self-actualize herself, a truly oppressive way of being. In this way, the film boldly stresses that, well, at least in this extreme (Puritan) form, Puritanism/Christianity is an “evil” way of being, robbing women (and people in general) of a natural and healthy way of being. And I would argue that though the film focuses on a particular time period of extreme Christian (Puritan) beliefs, I don’t think this means we should see that Christianity has evolved since then. Even today, women who are indoctrinated into toxic Christian belief systems are severely limited in self-determining and self-actualizing their selves. Sometimes it takes an exaggerated view of something to get one to see what that something really is, a toxic ideology.
The Most Radical Possibility Part 1: A Short Digression: The Rapture
One of the most mind blowing possibilities of The Witch is something that is rarely addressed in mainstream film. To digress for a second, there is a great film called The Rapture (1991, Michael Tolkin), that rare film that addresses more blatantly what I think The Witch is also boldly (though more subtly) revealing. In The Rapture, the main character, Sharon (Mimi Rogers), first becomes a reborn Christian but then unbelievably rejects God when the time comes for her ascendance to heaven. Her trajectory is a complex one. Towards the end of the film, after falling into despair over what seems like a Rapture that isn’t coming and at her daughter’s insistence to hasten her ascendance to heaven (the daughter is suffering greatly from being in the desert for too long), Sharon kills her daughter. The Rapture does come soon after but now Sharon is in distress at what she has done and blames it on a cruel God who seemed to make her and her daughter suffer in the desert for no reason. When she has the opportunity to leave purgatory and ascend to Heaven, she instead rejects God, asking who will “forgive God,” an unbelievable inversion of God/Christianity, calling out God and Christianity for its cruelties and penchant for making people suffer.
The Most Radical Possibility Part 2: Calling Out Christianity/God
There may be something similar going on in The Witch. Eggers does a great job getting at a fundamental coda of Christianity, how, at least in its Puritanical or Evangelical (fundamentalist) rendition, it doesn’t matter if one suffers in the real world, all that matters is earning one’s way to the afterlife/heaven. In other words, suffering is actually part of what God intends, suffering then becoming the adversity that tests one’s devoutness, one’s faith. Getting back to the film, in this context, then, it doesn’t matter if the Devil itself and/or the Devil’s emissary, the witch, have the power to destroy this family, the death of the family (and the failure of the crop and prospect of starvation) is not the point for God anyway or any Puritan, it is instead whether they stay devout throughout their suffering.
Even more palpable and I think symbolic is the fact that in this world of the film, the Devil and the witch are real and so the attack and killing of the family speaks to what I think the film might be saying, that God is not a benevolent entity. If God is not a benevolent entity – if God will allow this to happen by preternatural entities such as the witch and the Devil itself – just for the sake of testing its followers and seeing whether they can remain devout, that is perhaps the disturbing deeper implication that Eggers is getting at, a truly remarkable interrogation and deconstruction of a Christian God.
The Story of Job
In terms of thinking about how God is not benevolent but actually cruel and even sadistic, one could cite many examples, such as God asking Abraham to kill his own son or God’s encouragement of genocide and capital punishment or, for that matter, God’s devastation of whole cities and civilizations, children and all, but I think the story that best fits, indeed almost seems like an influence for this film, is the story of Job. (For a long list of the cruelties in the Bible — and other problems with it — see the article, “Some Reasons Why Humanist Reject the Bible.”) Here is how Wikipedia sums up this story: “[The Book of Job] addresses theodicy, why God permits evil in the world, through the experiences of the eponymous protagonist. Job is a wealthy and God-fearing man with a comfortable life and a large family; God, having asked Satan for his opinion of Job’s piety, decides to take away Job’s wealth, family and material comforts, following Satan’s accusation that if Job were rendered penniless and without his family, he would turn away from God and die.” The point of the story, of course, is to try and understand why God lets the most pious suffer, a way to make sense of God’s inaction in the world. In terms of the film, in the context of making the preternatural real in the film — Satan and the witch, and thus God itself — this need to understand why a pious family suffers greatly I would argue inverts this understanding; whether it is God making a pious individual suffer (Job) or whether it is God not intervening while other agents (witch/Devil) destroy a whole family (the family in the film), the film profoundly and radically suggests there is never any good reason for letting good (devout) people needlessly suffer and doing so reflects what the “Book of Job” reflects, a cruel and sadistic God.
Caleb and The Apple
One of the most disturbing moments in the film is when Caleb, who is suffering from some kind of illness or possession brought on presumably by the witch, seems to have at one point an apple lodged in his mouth. The father manages to pry open Caleb’s mouth and dislodge the apple. When we see the blackened apple roll to a stand still, we see that it has a bite taken out of it. After that, Caleb recites all the language that would suggest his devoutness. Perhaps more so than any character in The Witch, Caleb is the most tempted by his desires, again, represented by his desirous looks at his sister’s Thomasin’s breasts. In his evocative conversation with his father on original sin, Caleb clearly has anxiety about the whole conception of original sin, for both his brother’s Sam’s sake (Sam the baby has never been baptized and thus would seem destined for Hell) and for his own natural (“sinful”) desires. This moment is a powerful one, because it clearly calls out Christianity for its contradictions (an innocent baby is going to Hell; a young boy who has natural desires is a sinner) and how that creates in people – especially young people – a deeply felt anxiety over one’s apparently sinful self. This thread in the film is indeed another telling commentary on what seems like the cruel and sadistic-masochistic nature of at least one facet of Christianity. One of the original (Augustine) key tenets of Christianity is that people are born into “original sin,” this idea that people are born “sinners.” Again, the film touches on just how traumatic such a way of being can be for children, who then struggle with those natural (childish, immature) desires and choices all children have. As I suggest above, such a way of being can only be detrimental to the psyche of young people and as they grow into adults, this feeling of a having a low sense of self-worth as they can never measure up to a “pure” self demanded by Christian doctrine.
Caleb’s Temptation
Caleb’s thread reaches its climax when, in approaching the now beautiful witch, which is apparently some sort of an illusion she has created, Caleb seems tempted by her alluring and inviting sexuality. She kisses him and his fall then is complete. The bite out of the apple that comes out of his mouth seems to suggest that he has bitten the forbidden fruit and though the witch does this to him, whatever she has done, it is Caleb who still seems to be coded as fallen. His delirious and dying ramblings of devotion and devoutness seems to suggest a compensation for what he has been indoctrinated to believe, a kind of mocking of the superficiality of this unnatural belief system, Caleb perhaps desperately trying to talk his way back to “grace.” The bitten apple then seems to further this mocking, the witch punctuating this whole farce that is this unnatural belief in “sin”/original sin.
Another (desired?) Reading
I have come to like that Eggers seems to have made the witch and Devil real though it is interesting to think about this film being a psychological horror film and the witch and Devil not real. I think of The Babadook and how that film perfectly rides that fine line between suggesting a real monster but ultimately making it clear that the mother is the real “monster,” though of course “monster” becoming extremely complicated in the film. Likewise, had Eggers just made the “monster” be Puritanism/Christianity, then the family’s undoing would have all been their own, though due to being indoctrinated by a toxic belief system that wouldn’t let them be but “monsters.”
I did read one analysis that suggests this possibility that the witch and Devil not being real is indeed one way to read the film and I suppose one could read it this way, but boy it is hard to see that young witch (somehow creating an illusion for Caleb???) luring Caleb to his doom be anything but real! In any case, this is an interesting, alternative way to read the film.
The Ending (Not a Happy Ending)
The ending is as dark and painful to watch as any ending I’ve experienced. On the one hand, Thomasin sort of gets her “freedom,” in the sense that she doesn’t have to be oppressed anymore and is allowed to express her natural desires and self, or at least with less limitations. But this is a “freedom” that comes at a great cost, as she must sign over her soul to the Devil (called “Black Thomas” in the film) and become a witch, which, if the titular “witch” in the film is any example, means preying on Others, including babies and children, not a real “freedom,” not a “freedom” to be good, which is all Thomasin really wanted. In this context, as I suggest above, this is as bleak an ending as one could experience. But more than that, this ending could speak to one last radical idea, another dark deeper implication in the film, that Christianity doesn’t just drive Thomasin to the dark side but it could be that the film (Eggers) is suggesting that this is what Christianity – at least in its extreme form – does, make people sociopathic or even psychopathic.
